33 files and folders listed (which is the correct number confirmed by my file manager)

The extra 6 are the 4 dot files (which ls -a is supposed to show), 'source' which I can probably excuse because it is a broken symlink and Module.symvers which is a plain text file of 828kb. (It was actually one of the dot files that I was trying to find).

Oh God, I give up - come round and shoot me will you. I looked at that problem for an hour or more, tried it all different ways, different shells, with and without sudo, even different distros - still I couldn't see it. Not only that, but at the time I posted it I hadn't had anything to drink for 24 hours (maybe that was the problem )